Part III. Fitzwilliam and Darcy Chat.

while later Darcy returned from his morning outing and immediately disappeared into his study--without welcoming his cousin or even telling his sister he had returned. Fitzwilliam soon joined him there.

"Fitzwilliam, what on earth are you doing here. I thought you were still at your father's," Darcy said as he greeted his cousin.

"Yes, I just left there. I thought I would come and see how you and Georgiana were getting on. She seems well, and very excited about that dinner the two of you put on. It seems she is beginning to open up a bit at last. I think we made the right decision on bringing her out this winter."

"Yes, I agree. She handled herself very well; I was quite proud of her. She was still more shy than I would have liked to see, but she is making a good effort to improve."

"And you?" Fitzwilliam boldly said, "Are you making a good effort to improve?"

"What?" said Darcy, suddenly confused by the turn of the conversation.

Fitzwilliam had planned to be very direct with his friend, hoping that the shock would cause Darcy to confess all. "Well, cousin, it has been three months now, and you seem to be getting worse and not better. I can not say that I really know what happened to you in Kent, but you have certainly been a changed man ever since. And, though I do not know what happened there, I do have a fairly good idea."

"That is none of your business, Fitzwilliam," replied Darcy, closer to anger than he had ever been with his cousin.

"I believe it is my business, Darcy, in so far as it affects Georgiana. You see, she wrote to me a few days ago and from that letter and what she has told me this morning, I have learned that she is very worried about you. She is a great deal more observant than you give her credit for, cousin. She has noticed the change in your behavior and your troubled mind, not only since you returned from Rosings, but from the time you left Hertfordshire last year. She also seems discerning enough, much to my surprise, to have a very good idea of what is troubling you. You are causing her a great deal of anxiety, you know, cousin. I had hoped you would have shaken this off by now and am very sorry to hear otherwise. Believe me, Darcy, I do understand why you are so upset."

"You know nothing about it Fitzwilliam," Darcy said as he rose from his seat to stand by the window.

Fitzwilliam wondered how far he should push his friend, but decided he must get Darcy to speak of it. "I know she was a very special young lady, Darcy, and if either she or I had money, I would have been very interested in Miss Bennet myself."

Darcy let out a bitter laugh and said, "Yes, she seemed to like you a great deal."

"From what I can remember, you did not seem to like her very much. You two rarely carried on a conversation, and when you did, it seemed to more often degrade into an argument than not. At the time I had no idea you were interested in her. It was only later, after we had left Kent, that I became suspicious. You did ask her to marry you, did you not?"

Darcy was quiet for a time, and Fitzwilliam felt that he had pushed far enough.

"It almost seems like a dream now," Darcy said. "And I have dreamt about it so often--a nightmare really. I keep waking up in the middle of the night with her angry face before me--and her words ringing in my head. I behaved so badly, Fitzwilliam--the terrible things I said to her. Why did you not ever tell me I had been making an ass of myself?"

"Probably because I did not think that you were."

"I insulted her. I insulted her and hurt her family, and then expected her to be overjoyed that I would deign to pay my addresses! She should have thrown me out of the room at once--it would have been easier if she had thrown me out. But, no. I had to hear it--I am almost glad that I heard her opinion of me, I never knew before."

"Knew what, Darcy? What did she say?"

Darcy paused again. "Nothing at first. Only that she was not pleased about my asking her and that she wished that I had not done so. Despite all that I had said to her, she was generous enough to hope that my feelings for her would soon pass. The words I used, Fitzwilliam! You see, I did not want to be in love with her--I never wanted to be. I had struggled against it for months. I kept telling myself that I should not be--that she was beneath me. Her family, her ridiculous mother, her silly sisters, her connections, my responsibilities, all of it kept running through my head, over and over again for months. But in the end it was no use.

"What did I say to her? 'I know, and my family will certainly believe, that I should have done better in terms of both fortune and position. You must know that I am fully aware that the inferiority of your family and your connections would mean a degradation to my own, and that such an alliance would mean going against my responsibilities to my family, to my sister, and to myself.'

"After hearing that, how could she not have thrown me out at once! She only said that she did not welcome my affections, and that she was sure the feelings which had prevented me from addressing her sooner would overcome me at last. But I was not satisfied--I should have left well enough alone, but I had to know why I had been refused, and in asking her for her reasons, I had the audacity to accuse her of incivility!

"She said that she had every right to be uncivil after what I had said. Then she blamed me for hurting her sister. You never met her sister, Fitzwilliam. She is the sweetest girl--one can not describe her without using words like beautiful, and serene, and even angelic--and I hurt her. She knew that I had kept Bingley away from Netherfield; that I had persuaded him to break off his attachment to Jane. You remember, Fitzwilliam. I mentioned it to you once. I told you about a friend who had gotten himself entangled with an unsuitable lady, and who I managed to get un-entangled. The friend and the lady were Bingley and Miss Jane Bennet, her elder sister."

Fitzwilliam trembled at his cousin's words. He was struck with the sudden and terrible realization that he was the one to blame for Darcy's disappointment and all of the pain his friend had suffered. "Oh, my God, what have I done? I told her. She asked me about Bingley, and I said you were happy to have prevented him from entering into an imprudent marriage, and that you had triumphed over your success. I told her. I did not know, Darcy. You never mentioned who the lady was. I did not realize. How can you ever forgive me? I should never have spoken of it with her. This is my fault, Darcy--it is all my fault. Please forgive me. Please, please forgive me!"

Darcy was quiet for a time. "Then that is how she knew, I was never quite sure how she could have known. I know she must have suspected it from the start. The most you could have done, Fitzwilliam, is confirm her already strong suspicions. Do not blame yourself for this. It is not your fault, of that I am sure. She hated me long before I took Bingley away. If they had never met, if Bingley had never fallen in love with Jane or Jane with Bingley, she would still have refused me. You had nothing to do with it, cousin. Do not distress yourself. She had other reasons to hate me from the start.

"Were you aware that Wickham had spent time in Hertfordshire?"

"Yes, I might have heard something about it, but I make it a point not to pay much attention to what that man does," replied Fitzwilliam, not at all convinced that he was not to blame for all of the pain he saw before him.

"I wish I could do the same. He keeps reappearing in my life like a great nemesis. He was there. He joined a regiment in Meryton--not far from Netherfield and Longbourne--and he seemed to be a great favorite. He appeared to pay particular attention to Miss Bennet--and perhaps she to him. I believe he told her things about me, terrible things perhaps. I am sure he told her that I had grossly mistreated him. You can just imagine the veracity of what he said, but she had no reason to doubt him. Why should she not believe a pleasant, charming man, who was all attention and smiles, when he speaks of someone who had insulted her and everyone around her, and who could in no way be called pleasant or charming. I was able to tell her the truth in the end, though. I have no idea whether she believed me or not, or if she ever could believe me. I probably told her more than I ought, but I needed to tell her everything. I even told her about my sister."

"So, that was her reason? Because of what Wickham had told her?" Fitzwilliam asked.

"No. That is not really the reason either. The real reason is simply that she does not like me, or rather that she hates me. How could I ever have thought it otherwise? All my life I have been told that I could have any woman I wanted, that any woman would be honored to be my wife, but I chose the one woman out of a hundred, one out of a thousand, who would refuse. My position, my connections and fortune could not override in her mind the basic fact that she despised me. Any other woman would have put that aside and accepted me anyway, but not her. I have the greatest respect for her for that. So, in the very moment of her refusal, I found yet another reason to love her.

"She must have hated me from the very beginning. I first saw her at a ball in Meryton. You might remember, she mentioned it to you once. I did not want to be there. I could not imagine that there could possibly be anyone in a little country town worth knowing. I thought that everyone there was beneath me. I stalked about the room all evening staring down my nose at people I did not even know; I must have offended everyone there. Bingley was just the opposite, within half an hour he was acquainted with the whole room and having a grand time. He danced every dance, I think. I danced only with his sisters, though, as Miss Bennet said to you, gentlemen were scarce and more than one lady was seated and in want of a partner.

"At one point that evening, she was seated near me, and I was standing watching the dancers; it never even crossed my mind to seek an introduction and ask her to dance, then Bingley came over to me. She must have heard what we said. I am certain she must have heard it. He rebuked me for standing alone all evening and not dancing. I told him that I detested it, and that it would be a punishment to me to dance with any of the local girls. He laughed and said that the room was full of pleasant young ladies and that some of them were uncommonly pretty. I agreed that his favorite partner was very handsome. You see, he had already begun to attach himself to Jane Bennet. That is when he pointed her out to me and offered to have her introduced. I stared at her for a moment until I caught her eye, then I turned back and said, 'She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humor at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.' I do know how to make a good first impression, do I not?" Darcy said with a laugh.

"How was I to know then that within a few short weeks, there would be nothing in the world that I could want more than to dance with her?" he continued. "What an idiot! She must have hated me from that moment. What an arrogant, conceited, pompous idiot I was. That is what she said at Hunsford. I will never forget her words, as long as I live:

"'From the very beginning--from the first moment, I may almost say--of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain for the feelings of others, were such as to form that groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.'

"I was so very angry with her. She had said that I had not behaved in a gentlemanlike manner, and she was right; though I confess I did not admit that to myself for some time. It took me a while before I could see the justice in her words. That evening she held a mirror up to my face, and for the first time in my life, I was forced to see what I was--and I did not like what I saw. All of my pretensions and airs could not save me from that vision of myself. All my life I had thought I was somehow better than everyone else, that my position in life had placed me above the rest, but that night I was shown how wrong I was. Since then, I have become grateful to her for showing me, till that moment I never knew myself, and in knowing, there is hope for change. I have tried to change; I hope to God that I have. I would hate to think that I am still the same person who could have said the things I said to her, or acted the way I acted.

"If I could only show her that I have changed! She is as generous, I doubt not, as any of her sex, but while the memory of what I said to her still lives in her mind, I do not believe that even she could be generous enough to forgive me, or if there is even enough forgiveness in the world for that. If I could only have a chance to show her that I heard her words, and took them very much to heart; if I could know that she no longer thought ill of me, I could be content and would wish for nothing more--almost nothing more. If I could just see her again!"

"That is not very likely, Darcy."

"No. It is not," Darcy replied quietly.

"Darcy, whatever Miss Bennet may have said to you, you are one of the best men I know." Fitzwilliam was finally beginning to understand why Darcy had not been able to recover himself. "You are a generous man, Darcy, and a man of honor; your friends all know that you would do anything in the world to help them, if they needed you to. You are a good friend and brother, in her last letter to me Georgiana said that you were the kindest and sweetest of brothers. I know you to be unfailingly honest and just. You are very well regarded, Darcy. You must not be so hard upon yourself."

Darcy only shook his head.

"Darcy, stop torturing yourself like this. You must try to get over this--for your sake, and for Georgiana's. You are a good man, cousin."

"Please leave me alone, Fitzwilliam."

"Darcy,--" Fitzwilliam began.

"Please," Darcy interrupted. "Please leave me alone."

"Very well," he said as he headed for the door. "You need to snap out of this, Darcy. You also must talk to Georgiana. She is most anxious about you and needs reassurance that I can not give her."

"I shall talk to her," Darcy replied, and Fitzwilliam left the room.

Continued In Part IV